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Oh, yes. Yes! Anything at all.
Reason tried to intrude, to point out their situation, his shooting just fourteen hours ago. Reason didn’t have a prayer. What was it anyway? Just stupidities and shackles designed to waste life and chances and foster regrets and bitterness. If he wanted her, if he would have her, she’d offer herself. She did, made the offer open-ended, total, unconditional. “Anything, Dante.”
He bent slowly, holding her eyes until he took her lips in a fierce press. In only seconds he stepped back, still uncertain. She pulled him back, her wary self-consciousness gone, the unconditional tenderness she reserved for impersonal duty, the unguarded faith opening her arms around him and her mouth to his tongue.
“Dante…” His name sighed on her lips, a celebration, a supplication, a second chance at life. Her first real chance. He absorbed it into him, took her lips, her breath, like their first kiss. And nothing like it. No tender reassurance here. There were no preliminaries, just all-out invasion and headlong surrender. Never before. This connection, this pure craving, this clear access to another. She had never even imagined this mix of lust and trust, carnality and vulnerability.
She’d been waiting for this for ever. For this man. And she’d never even known. Never known there was that much to dream of. Had it really been only a day? Yes, and it had been her real lifetime, erasing her barren existence before it. It was enough to know he existed, that she could feel this way. She’d never ask for more. Never be the same.
He staggered back, sagged down on the couch, keeping their lips fused, tried to bring her down on his lap.
She resisted his hungry power. “I’ll hurt you…”
His groan reverberated inside her. “I hurt more where I’m not touching you. Touch me, Gulnar, give me your mouth, your body.”
His need sent hers raging, sank her into his mouth again, gasping for him. His breath filled her lungs. Just hours ago, he’d had none. He’d nearly drowned in his own blood, suffocated on his own breath. The tears that had poured out of her soul as she’d struggled to restore his ability to breathe welled again, flooded both their faces. He licked them all, murmured his craving, his soothing, nipped her quivering chin, stilled it in his teeth.
“Dante, you’re in pain—every time you draw breath…”
His grunt confirmed her words, the sound so deep and dark it scared her, aroused her beyond endurance. He only pulled her back into his kiss, muttered against her lips, “Then you kiss me, Gulnar—save me the effort. Let me feel you, tesoro, feel your heat and life and desire.”
She could resist her hunger, for his sake. No way could she withstand his. She capitulated, straddled his thighs, hers taking her weight, her arms keeping her torso off his. He wouldn’t let her keep that distance, his left arm pressing her down and forward.
“Dante!” It was too much—too poignant, feeling him hard with life and arousal. The promise of all that power inside her, the completion, the merging. He snatched his lips from hers to bury his pained pleasure in her neck. She rained her own kisses all over the slashed planes of his face, scraping her abandon across his beard.
“Help me…” His left hand wasn’t up to opening her shirt unaided. She was up to doing anything he wanted and what he wanted was more of her flesh, her willingness. She’d give him all.
Another surge of moist heat flooded her, demanding him inside her, granting them both release and oblivion. Her lips fed at his pulse as she fell into his rhythm, their clothes a chafing barrier. She unbuttoned her top, and what he did then stopped her heart.
He just laid his face against her breasts and breathed her in, breathed out her name almost like a mantra, a prayer. For endless minutes they just stayed there, with his head hugged to her breast, her heart beating just because he’d said her name.
Then he rubbed his face over her breasts, had her writhing before his lips closed over one nipple. She arched on a seizure, on a mute scream. She knew her body, her senses. They weren’t equipped to register that much. Never had there been sensations fiercer than caution, greater than detachment. It had to be him, his effect, causing her metamorphosis.
His eyes captured hers, showing her what it would be like with him driving inside her, filling, inflaming, assuaging. Her muteness shattered, her cries rose, her disbelief, too. Just promising her with his eyes and he was bringing her closer to an unknown cataclysm. Her tremors became quakes.
“Gulnar—from the moment I first saw you, do you know what I wanted to do to you? With you? For you?”
His words, the total abandon they painted, every license she couldn’t wait to grant him. They released her from the crippling build-up, completing the climax that drained her, left her hungrier. The hands that held his head to her breast tore at his headscarf, needing her fingers in his hair, luxuriating and—she froze.
No hair. He had no hair!
Surprise flooded her, immobilized her. Then curiosity swelled by degrees. Dante, without the presumed dark wavy hair? She finally jerked away, bracing herself for a different Dante from the one already imprinted on her awareness, and—Oh!
Her every mental image and presumption disintegrated. What were those compared to his reality?
He—he looked as if he’d just stepped out of a medieval fairy-tale! A knight sworn to an ascetic order—shaved and fasting, perpetually prepared for to-the-death battles!
And he wasn’t shaving the rest of balding hair, like so many men did. A barely there raven shadow clearly delineated his healthy hairline. But it would have been a crime to cover such perfection with hair, no matter how luxurious. He just had to know how unique a shaved head made him look. If he didn’t, her stunned hunger would surely tell him.
“Oh, Dante…” Her eyes closed as she reached for him, her hands itching to experience his regal symmetry and strength in unhindered touching.
He aborted her eager grope, pushed her hands away. She almost stumbled off his lap. Her heart did, plummeted all the way down to her gut.
He was withdrawing, all intimacy leaving his expression, distress, disappointment flooding in its wake.
She sat still, sick electricity arcing in her flesh, waiting for him to spell it out. He did, and life dimmed back to its dreary monotone.
“Hell, I’m sorry Gulnar…” His strident breath wheezing out of him, he slumped back, closed his eyes. Then he opened them, turbid and disturbed and averted from her still-exposed breasts. “You’re suffering from post-traumatic stress and I took advantage of it…”
